Doc, is it serious?

Galen, one of the first anti-woman
propagandists in the medical field

A few months ago, I heard a radio interview with Joe Fassler, a regular contributor to The Atlantic, in which he relayed an absolutely horrifying experiencing his wife was subjected to when she went to the ER in excruciating pain.  I won't re-hash it all here, but you can read the full piece if you're in the mood to become incredibly upset.  It affected me significantly; I would say that it was one of the primary motivators that drove me to choose an exploration of patriarchy as TFP's first month-long deep dive.

Today we discuss a few of the ways patriarchy infiltrates the medical field.  It's an incredibly potent illustration for anyone who, like me, can be uncontroversially labeled with the white male identity.  If you share that identity with me but you don't understand what other people are irritated about, what the 'feminazis' are so upset about, now that we're all equal and all, then read on.  Hopefully you'll discover just how much easier your life has been because you were lucky enough to be born into the presumptively 'normal' identity group.

Worms and Snails versus Sugar and Spice

It's been pretty thoroughly established: male and female bodies differ quite significantly.  These differences extend beyond the obvious sexual anatomical distinctions to thousands of more subtle differences that manifest in essentially every major biological system.  This truism might not seem like a big deal until one recalls the fact that since white men have had almost exclusive dominance over all major cultural institutions on the developed world until the last half century or so.  Long story short: in countless situations, decisions are made that privilege male biology over female biology.

Sometimes these choices only result in minor, nuissance-level irritations.  One example that hit the mainstream last year was the revelation that thermostats in most offices were calibrated to suit the metabolism of middle-aged men, which would explain why women are so often uncomfortably (or even unbearably) cold in offices and schools.

Sometimes the consequences are more severe.  For instance, heart attacks often have extremely different symptoms in males and females (in addition to chest pain and left-side numbness/weakness, women frequently and intensely experience shortness of breath and nausea/vomiting).  Most people aren't aware of these differences, which leaves many more heart attacks in women undiagnosed.  Given that cardiac disease is the number one killer among women in the developed world, I'd say that the costs of male-normed medical knowledge are significant for those born without penises.

He's a doctor, he knows what he's doing

The absurdity of the entire situation becomes even more dramatic when one discovers that even highly trained medical professionals demonstrate and reinforce the prioritization and normalization of the male body at the expense of the female.  The anatomy textbooks they study in medical school prime them to defend this bias; the educational and reference materials use images and illustrations of (white) male anatomy at a rate three times higher than female anatomy for biological features that exists in both males and females.  Three times!  Imagine the normative effect this embeds in these doctors minds, if only on a subliminal level.  Worse still, much of the data and treatment information included in the texts is only appropriate for male patients, with no instructions on how to adjust for females - things like dosage recommendations for medications, for instance.

You might think that the extremely intelligent people that choose to become doctors aren't phased by this stuff, that they can treats patients objectively and effectively irrespective of sex.  You'd be wrong.  One of the most soul-crushing angles that Mr. Fassler's piece in The Atlantic explores is the ways in which declarations of pain are treated differently depending on whether they come from men or women.  The fact is that men's pain is taken more seriously, and women's pain is often dismissed.  Women are expected to prove that they're sick and in need of care, while doctors will take the pleas of help coming from male patients for granted.  There have been cases of women seeking medical care while suffering from physically real and excruciating pain, and instead being treated for hysteria or other mental illnesses (the term hysteria actually originates from ancient Greek medical texts; women were said to suffer from it when their uterus was drifting around their body causing trouble.  The preferred cure was to weigh the darn thing down with a baby to keep it from wandering off).

I don't really know where else to go with this, except to exhort anyone who's convinced that we live in a totally equal society where everyone gets the same chances to think long and hard about that assumption.  Chances are you only feel that way because you don't have as much horrible shit to deal with by virtue of your fortunate chromosomes.

Is science a man's game?

Marie Curie

Yesterday I promised a more thorough rebuttal of Larry Summer's blithe assertion that women were inherently inferior at science, and that this had been convincingly established by behavioral genetics.  One distinctive anecdote from his own speech that he believes illustrates his point is a story about his own daughter.  According to numerous accounts of the talk, the story goes that when his daughter was a toddler, he gave her two trucks to play with (as part of an attempt at "gender neutral" parenting).  He was surprised to see her treat them like dolls, calling one of them the "daddy truck" and the other the "baby truck."  From his perspective, this demonstrated the female tendency to reframe observations within a nurturing, reproductive framework to which they are predisposed, rather than making objective observations about phenomena to construct understanding.  So let's unpack all of that, shall we?

Difference is Real

No one can deny that some part of sexual difference is biological, rather than the result of socialization - breasts, vaginas, and penises for example.  Similarly, since all of those gross anatomical differences come with associated hormonal differences, it's not a controversial argument in my mind to suggest that men's brains and women's brains might also manifest certain differences that might cause them to look at the world differently.  I confess that have a very materialistic view of the world (in the sense that I think that our physical corpus, the matter in our brains, the cocktail of chemicals surging through our bodies are sufficient to explain human behavior without resorting to some kind of indescribable soul or essence); it's also my personal experience that within men and women there exist a tremendous range of personalities, tendencies, and world views, and that any generalization will fail to capture many peoples' experiences.  However, I think that the statistical, epidemiological level, one could observe differences in the behavior patterns of men and women that could be attributed to genetic, biological differences.  So I suppose you could say that I don't object per se to the explicit premise of Summers's argument: in the big picture, there are real biological differences between the ways men and women see the world.

Objectivity is a myth

HOWEVER - what I find extremely objectionable is the implied premise that follows: that the way

Rachel Carson.  She's the reason we're
not all getting cancer from DDT.

men look at the world is somehow inherently better, and therefore when women engage in scientific pursuits, they do so with an inherent disadvantage.  I've blogged before about Paul Feyerabend's argument that an exclusionist attitude towards the production of knowledge is foolish and counterproductive, and Summers's attitude is a prime example of how a representative of the dominant group attempts to preserve dominance by privileging his own perspective, at the expense of the oppressed group in particular and of society more generally.  Summers' tacit conceit that there's a right way and a wrong way to do science and that men do it the right way is a not-so-subtle entrenchment of patriarchal elitism that tells men that what comes most naturally to them is best and what comes most naturally to women is inherently less valuable.  To put it more simply - I don't think it's wrong to point out differences between men and women, but the attachment a value statements to tendencies associated with one gender or the other should be viewed with extreme skepticism.

But what about all the awesome stuff that we've gotten from science?

That's what you might be asking about now.  If Summers is suggesting that the male way of doing science is best, perhaps its because it has yielded such tremendous technological dividends.  Well, here's a few quick thoughts on that point.

1. The goods of the status quo aren't an argument against doing things differently, and particularly doing them more inclusively.  We have no matriarchal alternate universe to compare with our own that might help us understand what the scientific world might look like if it were dominated by female knowledge production.  In any case, Feyerabend's original argument emphasizes inclusion: any practice, any approach that yields useful insights for life or inquiry has value and validity, and we'd all be better off if we could take an instrumental, "all of the above" approach to our understanding of the world.
2. Science has done plenty of horrible things as well.  Summers critiqued his daughter for the nurturing attitude she took towards her toy trucks; perhaps that ethical dimension might have diminished the likelihood of the invention or proliferation of weapons of mass destruction, or fostered more attention to environmental and resource preservation at an earlier stage in human technological development.  One might argue, in fact, that to the extent that typically "masculine" traits are manifested in science, they've endangered the survival of the human race and the entire ecosphere.  That's a consequence worth considering.
3. The idea that there is a proper "methodology" is really a myth that's deployed to silence voices that the dominant group finds threatening.  Feyerabend's entire book centers around an analysis of Galileo's challenge to the heliocentric theory, and systematically demonstrates that he disregards nearly all aspects of the process that has been enshrined as the "scientific method."

Perhaps I could have summed this post up much more succinctly with the following statement and question.  "Larry Summers thinks women are bad at science.  But who gets to decide what good science is?"

Out of Sync

Here in Sandy Springs the fall semester comes to a close today, and it for me it brings to mind the natural cycles that define the contours of our daily experience.  As a teacher, my senses are finely attuned to the academic calendar, from the micro-oscillation from Monday to Friday to the grander tides that carry us from anxious excitement in August to dreary resignation in October all the way back to excited anticipation in May again.  These are the cycles with which I cannot negotiate, which I'm obliged to live within as a condition for participating in modern society.  Our industrialized sophistication - electric lighting, temperature control, internal combustion engines - has liberated us from subjugation to the passage of the sun and the seasons.

But it wasn't so long ago that Christina and I were living in an entirely different cultural context where social patterns still conformed with the dictates of the local ecosystem.  And it was amazing.

We were both Peace Corps volunteers in the developing nation of Burkina Faso.  Neither of us lived in a large city; she had electricity, while my village was scheduled to get its first power line "sometime soon" (read: "sometime in the next ten years".)  The majority of the Burkinabe live without modern utilities and rely on subsistence agriculture, with grain cultivation ramping up during the rainy season from June to October.  From weather to seasonal imperatives for the agricultural cycle to access to light, most peoples' lives in Burkina Faso, ours included, are influenced by many factors that cannot be controlled.  And I really think it made it easier to be happy, for at least two different reasons.

First, existing within the constraints of one's ecosystem naturally restricts the choices one can make in any given moment. I've blogged before about the problem that choices pose for happiness; life in modern societies place us in the constant position of being able to challenge the natural decision-making that we would otherwise make.  In Burkina Faso, when it's raining cats and dogs outside, no one goes anywhere.  Battling the elements is way too much of an obstacle to consider running around on non-essential errands.  By contrast, in the United States, citing "rain" as a reason not to attend a social function or go to the grocery store is likely to cost you some serious points with your friends and loved ones.  Our expectations are shifted by the array of possibilities made available by technology, such that dozens of times every single day we're asked, even expected to ignore biological signals in order to participate maximally in the efficiency society.  That constant pressure to choose is bad enough in and of itself, but it's particularly bad in those moments when we're being asked to reject natural signals that give us valuable feedback.

Which brings me to my second point: I think that although we may think that our scientific knowledge production is sufficient to measure and mitigate all the consequences of our evolving technological society, we may very well be drastically wrong.  I am by no means anti-science; in fact, I strongly believe in rigorous empiricism as a means to build human knowledge.  However, whereas many "science-minded" people center their worldview around a sort of scientific positivism ("I only believe in things that can be definitely established through repeated scientific observation"), I believe that we'd all be better served by negativism: "I don't reject the possibility of any phenomenon unless it can be definitely rejected through repeated scientific observation".  The hubris implied in positivism, that we are capable of testing and understanding all aspects of our Universe - it just seems laughable, not to mention seriously challenged by the evolving nature of scientific knowledge itself.

Consider, for instance, the current level of scientific knowledge as it exists in various domains.  On the one hand, we can make mind-bogglingly precise predictions about the trajectories of subatomic particles in high-energy collisions.  On the other hand, we have extremely limited understanding of the biological processes that govern sleep and nutrition, perhaps the two most fundamental elements of human health.  If we can't even make a reasonable hypothesis about how and why sleep contributes to our normal biological functioning, how in the world can we confidently assume that the monumental changes inflicted on human sleep cycles by electric lighting haven't had significant impacts on our physical or mental health?

I can tell you from my own anecdotal experience that when I was living in a place where I could go to sleep with and get up with the sun, I never slept better.  Even when it was miserably hot and humid, I slept like a baby.  I felt better.  I could listen to the messages my intuition was sending me, about when I needed rest and solitude, about when I needed fellowship and celebration, and so did everyone else, and it made it exponentially easier to deal with all the little physical discomforts of life.

All I'm saying is that what we gain in technological efficiency and productivity comes at a cost that we haven't even begun to understand how to measure.  But I've lived it, and I'm telling you that it's real.

The Corporate Model for Interdisciplinary Teaching

I'm a member of the Teacher's Guild, and last week I shared some work that a few of my colleagues and I are doing to build an interdisciplinary unit centered around redesigning bicycles.  Our goal was to facilitate collaboration between different classes with few overlapping students.  The solution we're in the process of rolling out right now is a project-centered collaboration, where students in different classes contribute to design ideas that live in design briefs that travel from class to class.

Here's the flyby concept: Students in an engineering class used research and interviews to identify the biggest areas of improvement in bicycle design.  They worked up some prototype proposals for these improvements - ideas ranged from incorporating pneumatic suspensions into the seat post to modifying the tire tread to model the frictional properties of shark skin.  Then they sent their proposals along to students in my AP Physics class, who designed experiments to yield data on the value and functionality the engineering students' designs.  They passed their collected data along to an Algebra 2 class that did the number crunching for the experimental data, at which point the conclusions were sent back for the consideration of the engineering class, who is currently considering a second design iteration informed by the data.  In my vision, the student collaboration functions similarly to the collaboration that occurs between the departments of a corporation; the engineering students are Designers, AP Physics represents R&D, and the Algebra students are Data Analytics.

So far, the process had yielded both excitement and frustration for the students involved as they grapple both with the class content underlying their contributions to the project, as well as learning to communicate and collaborate with students in other classes through a variety of media (emails, technical documents, and in-person discussions).

There are certainly some tweaks that we'll make in future versions of the project, but I'm super excited about the general method, and I think it could be generalized to include nearly any combination of courses.  I present here a brief run-down of the major design considerations that went into (or perhaps should go into a future version of) our project design that could potentially be generalized:

1. Decide which courses and instructors will participate in your interdisciplinary project, then search for broad areas that could potentially provide areas of overlap.  All of our collaborating courses were STEM, so focusing on re-working the technical details of something like a bicycle was a natural fit.  However, I think that it wouldn't have been much of a stretch to include other courses as well; for instance, art students could work on visual/aesthetic design aspects.  Environmental Science students can prepare environmental impact statements to compliment bicycle designs, and so on.
2. Identify a course that can drive the initial launch of the project with design thinking.  Whatever your ideas is, designing your unit so that it originates from student curiosity and interacting with real, compelling issues are big factors in student buy-in.  If answering this question is confusing to you, think about it through the following lens: if you imagine your collaborating courses as departments in a corporation, what is the product or service that your corporation provides?  Who is its customer?  Which department will have the most direct interaction with the customer?  Whichever department is most responsible for understanding the needs of the user being served by your project (even if you don't literally intend to deliver your project to a user) is probably the most logical choice.  The project is like a baton that is passed from class to class.  You just need to identify who starts with the baton.
3. Consider if other complimentary opportunities for collaboration exist that can supplement the primary project.  For instance, our AP physics and Algebra Two classes will work together on three additional labs over the course of the semester.  These are labs I do every year, slightly re-framed to help the AP students learn the underlying physics while working through the lens of bicycle mechanics.  While working on force, energy, and rotational dynamics, physics and math students work together on experiment design, data collection, analysis, and forming conclusions.  We chose to incorporate these additional elements because
1. it primes the students for the larger collaboration of the project, allowing more opportunities for students to iterate on their communication/collaboration strategies.
2. it allows and enhances the students' understanding of the learning objectives that already exist for each course.  Physics students are forced to clarify and articulate their understandings.  Math students see clearly how their calculations correspond to and inform real measurements and designs.
4. Determine a timeframe for project activities in each course.  We looked at our learning outcomes (particularly in Algebra and Physics), considered how the needs of the project interacted with content we already intended to teach, and set a tentative schedule for collaboration between courses.
5. Design opportunities for exhibition and celebration of the students' design process.  This is the area where our project is most poorly articulated.  We are still working to determine what kind of final deliverable makes sense given the possibilities and constraints our students work within, and what sort of audience will get to see those deliverables.  I think that had we done this before beginning the project, it would have further improved student buy-in and help sustain their curiosity and interest as the project enters difficult iterative stages.

These are the basic elements of our planning.  There are countless little details that will enrich this general formula (for instance, the intentional incorporation of self- and group- assessment after collaboration), but I leave the details to my qualified colleagues out there.

The Nueva School is featuring our bicycle project at its biannual Innovation Learning Challenge this afternoon in one of its #MashupILC sessions.  I can't wait to see the amazing ideas that will be generated.  Hopefully this design rationale will be helpful to those of you out there considering similar ideas.  

Against Method

While we're on the subject of science this week, I'd love to cast a spotlight on one of my favorite scholars of science, the twentieth century epistemologist out of Berkley, Paul Feyerabend (here's another look back at scientific epistemology vs. religion, for those interested).

His seminal work, Against Method, came out in 1975 and serves as a counterpoint view to Thomas Kuhn's narrative of gradual waves of mounting revolutions in understanding.  By contrast, Feyerabend's view is anarchic, unstructured, and all encompassing.  He challenges the very epistemological narrative of the singular scientific method which produces steady increases in the body of human knowledge through repeated, inductive observations.

His alternative proposal - anything goes.  No method for producing knowledge should be preferred over any other, and in the swirling marketplace of ideas that would inevitably result, unpredictable synergies, interpretations of events that could radically expand our understanding of the Universe might be attained that would never be accessible if we constantly privilege one mode of knowledge production.

His case is persuasive; he builds his argument against privileging the scientific method by critically analyzing one of the seminal cases often presented as a victory of scientific methodology: Galileo's heliocentric theory.

For instance, one of the hallmarks of the classical narrative of scientific progress through continuous induction is the claim that as we refine our understanding of the Universe, we will be able to make more accurate predictions.  Except Galileo's predictions of astronomical trajectories were less accurate than those made with the prevailing geocentric models of the time.

Another example - replicability.  There are numerous documented cases of Galileo making claims of observations made through his telescope which other observers could not distinguish when gazing through his instruments.

A third - that scientific arguments propagate and succeed based on sound logical defense.  Galileo was largely successful in propagating his theories because he relied on his own cult of personality and a slew of fallacies that persuaded the unschooled layperson.  Galileo employed arguments he knew to be false in order to build support for his theory which he intuitively believed to be true.

And in the long view, history has vindicated Galileo.  Neither is Feyerbend's argument isn't that we should condemn Galileo.  On the contrary, he raises Galileo's tremendous success as proof positive that when we don't slavishly adhere to one version of creating and interpreting truth, that we might open our minds to considerably deeper understanding.

We can talk to rocks

Last month I reviewed All the Light We Cannot See; one of my favorite elements of the book is one of the youthful's character's fascination with science.  Seen through the open-minded lens of childhood, scientific explanations of phenomena seem to him not to dispel or lessen the fantastical nature of the universe, but rather to make that mysticism even more profound.  It rekindled something that lived in me once, and since then I've been looking at certain aspects of our modern technological life with a rekindled sense of wonder.

silicon - the element from which many computer components are made

For instance, if you really think about it, we've developed a language for communicating with inanimate objects - to communicate our desires to a constructed network of physical elements that will then do our bidding.  That's right - computers are really a way for human beings to talk to rocks.

Just think about it - as a species, we have learned how to manipulate the flow of subatomic particles by clever positioning of electric fields produced by particular combinations of chemical compounds.  We harness that electrical flow to sort human-generated input, push it through multiple layers of interpretation, tracing the flows of these electrons until they actually instigate physical changes in the arrangement of microscopic switches that encode binary information on a physical server perhaps thousands of miles away from the location where our thoughts are being produced.  We have crafted a mechanism for storing millions of thoughts in the rocks that we pull from the ground.  Who can say the world isn't a magical place?

And that really only describes the first layer of digital architecture.  We've moved far beyond the elementary storage of information that can be recalled an interpreted by non-human entities; we've designed non-human entities that can follow commands we issue, that can combine inputs from their human masters with digitally stored information and data collected from its surroundings to execute tasks and make decisions.

I don't know how to go on without belaboring the point, so I suppose I'll leave it at that, but doesn't it just seem like if you squint your eyes enough that science and magic, logic and mysticism are just two different languages for describing the same multi-faceted reality?

The Crowd Sourcing Conundrum

I've been wrestling with a question for years now, and what better to do with our complex musings than to air them out in the confused, liminal space that is the internet.  The head-scratcher boils down to this - it seems like large numbers of more or less ordinary people collaborating can achieve incredible results, but so many people just seem so... stupid!

One widely published story over the last few years that gets at the heart of what's eating at me is the results achieved by the protein folding game FoldIt.  Programmers designed an online game that allowed regular joes to prototype protein configurations in enzymes.  Within months, the crowd-sourced protein folders had surpassed the best results of experts in the field, scientists with many years of education and specialization.

Remember that adage about monkeys and type-writers?  The FoldIt story suggests that a million monkeys at type-writers might not only be able to produce Shakespeare, but that they might be able to do even better and in less time.

Another illustrative example - Wikipedia.  Considered unusable as a citation in most academic anyone  could edit Wikipedia at any time.  And yet, it sports a lower error frequency than the Encyclopedia Britannica, which has recently concluded print publication, so perhaps that should tell us something.

contexts because of the fact that it can be freely edited by anyone with an open-ended information vetting process.  After all, anyone  could edit Wikipedia at any time.  And yet, it sports a lower error frequency than the Encyclopedia Britannica, which has recently concluded print publication, so perhaps that should tell us something.  We're programmed to defer to authority and expertise, even though collective efforts have often proved more effective.

What is it that makes a big enough group of normal people into a collective manifestation of genius?  Some of us in the bunch of real dumb-dumbs, but somehow that doesn't seem to ruin everything.  It reminds me of an analogy Douglas Hoffsteader uses in his absolutely brilliant Goedel, Escher, and Bach.  He creates a character named Aunt Hillary, that is actually literally an ant hill.  It was the first time I really imagined a multitude of individuals as constituents of a larger organic whole.  What if we are all just cells in the global earth human symbiotic organism?  Each of us a neuron, busily adding to the collective computational and creative energy of the greater whole.  Viewed in this light, as we continue to consume and process information all the live long day, we can at least imagine we're contributing to something bigger than ourselves.

Jesus v. Heisenberg

Kaleidoscopic Inspiration in Notre Dame.  trefpool.com

For those of you who may not know, I am a science teacher.  I work at a school with some religious affiliations, and for the last two years, I've offered a seminar that explored a tension point that divides our society and inspires a colorful collection epithets lobbed between the two camps:

Science vs. Religion.

Most people begin this conversation by advocating for the truth and importance of one of the contenders, which misses the point entirely.  The ideological conflict between these two institutions remains unresolved for most because neither side accepts the basic arguments made by other - there's no way to begin the conversation.  This is happening because people want to start their conversations in the middle, rather than at the beginning.

HERE is where the conversation begins: Science and Religion are both epistemological lenses - ways take the information around you and filter it into an interpretation of what the world really "is".  They have some important things in common, and some very important differences.

What could science and religion possibly share, you might ask? Most crucially, both are based on assumptions that can never be proven to be true.  Everything you've ever seen has been filtered through your eyes.  Everything you've ever heard has been filtered through your ears.  You have no way of verifying whether or not the images you see in front of you correspond to some kind of objective reality that actually exists.  Neither does anyone else - assuming other people actually do exist.  You don't know if you're plugged into the Matrix, or just a figment in the imagination of God.

This is a millennia-old philosophical quandary known as solipsism - the idea that we can't know what

Jesus power.  trefpool.com

is "real" because we can never look at reality from the outside, so to speak.  There is even a mathematical basis for solipsism: Goedel's Incompleteness Theorem demonstrates quite clearly that it is mathematically impossible to build a coherent, logical system without starting from basic, unprovable assumptions.  We glaze over these assumptions in our everyday lives because they're convenient, but convenience isn't the same thing as truth.

Did you hear that, militant atheists that belittle religious people for believing things?  Whether or not you realized it, your entire worldview is based on fundamental assumptions about the Universe that you will never, ever be able to prove, any more than a religious person can prove the existence of God.  We're all taking it on faith.  We all just believe whatever feels the most true to us.

Just some food for thought.

Do You Speak Science?

For all the high school graduates out there, how many of you can still tell me how to predict the formation of ionic solids in solutions?  Or compute the terminal velocity of a projectile?  Or give me the Linnean nomenclature for more than three species?

Of the people that answered yes to the questions above, how many of you are not working in a science-oriented profession?  I'd be willing to bet the fraction is staggeringly small.  And I also think that's ok.  Clearly, many Americans have grown up to become successful contributing members of society while simultaneously forgetting the finer points of chemistry and physics.

On the other hand, if the intricacies of many scientific subjects aren't essential for a life well lived, and if many people who are exposed to these ideas don't retain them or retain a significantly inaccurate impression of the state of scientific understanding as they move forward in life, it does raise the question of what we could or should be doing in our science classes.  My argument is that while a robust exploration of science content is valuable for students that are particularly interested in those disciplines, ALL students need a thorough education in science literacy - that is, understanding the essential nature of science as a world view and methodology for increasing human understanding on the world, and where that fits into the spectrum of human experience.

So why shift gears?  What do we have to gain?  How could that possibly compare to what we as a society might lose if our students are required to complete a rigorous curriculum in biology, physics and chemistry?  Well, I think there are three salient points to consider.

1. Most people don't remember (or inaccurately recall) what they learned in high school science classes.  If your own life experience isn't enough to convince you of this, consider the findings from this Pew Center report on the level of science knowledge in America - granted the sample size of thirteen questions is relatively small, but it's still quite telling that 50-80% of respondents incorrectly answered EXTREMELY basic science content questions - I'm not talking fine details here, I'm talking about high level bullet points covered in the first week of class.  In the same way that you're unlikely to remember the details of the plot of Gatsby unless you read and discuss it semi-regularly, you're not likely to recall these sorts of details unless you leverage the knowledge on a semi-regular basis.  That trend is pretty well established in cognitive neuroscience.  So what's the harm in shifting gears?  Most students don't recall what they've been taught anyway.

2. A detail oriented, rigorous science curriculum is disempowering for people that aren't naturally inclined toward math and science.  From the same Pew Center study linked above, nearly 50% of people who took the pool said they steered away from math/science majors because "science is too hard"; now granted this pertains to choices of academic major, but I think it's a fair wager to say that the same phenomenon plays out on the high school level.  Students that find science too difficult will write off the entire subject, and close themselves off from an entire realm of human knowledge and exploration.

3. Understanding the basic nature of science is more important than ever.  If you want to be a responsible member of a democracy, you need to have the wherewithal to evaluate claims made in the public sphere, to decide which policies and candidates you will support, and to understand when you're being fed a giant load.  Many of the arguments surrounding global warming, for instance (particularly from the Conservative side) play upon a deep misunderstanding of the way that science works and the way scientific knowledge is developed.  People who don't understand science because they were alienated from it at a young age will be susceptible to buying snake oil from its many talented sales agents.

A science education focused more on developing high level conceptual understanding of science practices and norms, rather than obsessing over the details, would resolve all of these issues, because it would allow the repetitive development of broad themes (better for cognitive retention), demonstrate clear applications to real world policy discussions (leading to lifelong retention, application, and understanding), and be more approachable to a broad base of young Americans who will be bombarded with more scientific claims and skeptical grousing than any previous generation.

If you're curious, by the way, about how well you "speak science", try the Nature of Science Questionnaire used by curriculum researchers.  If you have a really hard time answering these questions... well, maybe that tells you something about what you should have been learning in science class.